Arnold's view of emeeson and caklyle 133 



or Carlyle or Goethe. Mr. Lowell has well de- 

 scribed the apparition of Emerson, to your young 

 generation here, in the distant time of which I am 

 speaking, and of his workings upon them. He was 

 your Newman, your man of soul and genius visible 

 to you in the flesh, speaking to your bodily ears, — a 

 present object for your heart and imagination. That 

 is surely the most potent of all influences ! nothing 

 can come up to it. To us at Oxford, Emerson was 

 but a voice speaking from three thousand miles 

 away. But so well he spoke that from that time 

 forth Boston Bay and Concord were names invested 

 to my ear with a sentiment akin to that which 

 invests for me the names of Oxford and Weimar; 

 and snatches of Emerson's strain fixed themselves 

 in my mind as imperishably as any of the eloquent 

 words which I have been just now quoting." 



A lofty and eloquent introduction was that, and 

 one well worth the subject and the occasion. The 

 disappointment and irritation which his hearers felt 

 as the lecturer proceeded arose from the fact that 

 the critic was at much less pains to justify this 

 favorable view of Emerson, which he had sounded 

 in his opening note, than he was to establish the ad- 

 verse view of him as a poet and philosopher which 

 he felt sure would in time be taken. The gist of 

 the speaker's view of Emerson was briefly as fol- 

 lows : Emerson was not a great poet, was not to be 

 ranked among the legitimate poets, because his 

 poetry had not the Miltonic requirements of simpli- 

 city, sensuousness, and passion, He was not even a 



